We Can Protect Ourselves from the Zika Virus

Liberals are always attempting to lecture the rest of us about safety – especially the safety and wellbeing of the children. We must child proof our houses. Children mustn't be allowed to play with small toys for fear of choking. We must purchase the correct car seat and kids must always have a proper bike helmet. We must make sure they have child-approved medicines and keep them sealed. We must have no firearms within a mile of children. We must keep children away from lead paint, lest they ingest paint chips, causing physical and mental defects.

Pregnant mothers are also treated with kid gloves. Every precaution is taken to make sure they give birth to a healthy baby. In other words, we do (and overdue) whatever is necessary to keep our kids and moms-to-be safe and healthy.

But even with all the precautions parents take, something as insignificant as a mosquito can throw an entire family for a loop. I'm speaking, of course, of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which is spreading rapidly through South and Central America, and now into the Southern United States.

The Zika virus causes mild flu-like symptoms in otherwise healthy adults, "but in pregnant women it has been linked to an alarming increase in the rate of the birth defect known as microcephaly - a debilitatingly small head and brain size." Dr. Margaret Chan of the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General describes the outbreak as an "extraordinary event and a public health threat to other parts of the world."

Experts at the CDC have issued a new set of guidelines for travelers to affected areas, and work on a vaccine is being done at a feverish pace. It seems everything that can be done at this time is being done to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

Well, not everything. See, there's one thing the experts at the CDC, the WHO, and every other whacky leftist American and world health group will never consider. The one thing that could more than likely put a halt to this scourge, the same way it virtually eradicated malaria, and that is DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). The very same pesticide that helped our troops win World War II. Prior to its widespread use, we lost more men to malaria in both the South Pacific and European theaters than we did to the enemy.

In the 1950s, the then much more reasonable WHO sanctioned widespread use of DDT, largely financed by the United States, cutting the rate of malaria in affected areas by 99% or more. One example is that of Sri Lanka, formerly known as British Ceylon. With the introduction of DDT, the cases of malaria went from millions in the 1940s to 17 by 1963. Its use was then banned the following year, and cases spiked back to half a million by 1969.

In 1962, thoughts about DDT's widespread use were being questioned with the release of the book Silent Spring, penned by a lefty activist Rachel Carson, claiming that DDT was harming the environment, killing birds, and permeating the bodies of fish, livestock, and pets. The book was a very effective propaganda tool against the life-saving pesticide.

Then, in 1970, the progressive Nixon administration formed the EPA. He should have been impeached for that! Less than a year later, the newly formed environmental watchdog launched an investigation of DDT. After seven months of hearings involving 125 expert witnesses and 365 exhibits entered, the presiding judge, Edmund Sweeney declared "The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.... DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man."

But the fix was already in, regardless of the evidence to the contrary. In 1972, the EPA banned the use of DDT in America and the world soon followed suit. According to his own chief of staff, William Ruckelshaus, head of the EPA, did not attend a single hearing and read not a word of the Judge's findings. The health of the world's poor be damned - DDT was going to be banned.

Other pesticides, such as deltamethrin, were developed to replace DDT, but none have been effective. This is because DDT is a mosquito repellent. Replacement insecticides seek to kill the mosquitoes, so they eventually develop a resistance. Others just aren't an effective deterrent.

In 2000, researchers from the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda MD did a comparison study of DDT vs. deltamethrin, conducted in Belize. "In and around a trio of dirt-floor, thatched huts in southern Belize, John P. Grieco monitored the behavior of the malaria-carrying mosquito Anopheles vestitipennis. Mosquitoes entered an untreated hut at dusk and left at sunrise. After the interior walls of a second hut were sprayed with deltamethrin, the mosquitoes entered at dusk but left by midnight. As expected, Donald R. Roberts notes, 'the whole time they were inside, the mosquitoes were biting [us].'

However, DDT sprayed inside the third hut repelled the flying bloodhounds. Only 3 percent as many mosquitoes entered the DDT-sprayed hut as the other two. Of those few mosquitoes that did venture in, most exited without biting."

To date, there is still nothing even close to being as effective as the judicious use of DDT for eradicating mosquito-borne illness; yet the politics of the know-it-all leftists who control these organizations will not allow it. They would much prefer the unneeded death of millions worldwide from malaria and birth defects from the Zika virus than admit the science behind the ban of DDT is junk.

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About the AuthorThe Common Constitutionalist

Brent, aka The Common Constitutionalist, is a Constitutional Conservative, and advocates for first principles, founders original intent and enemy of progressives. As well as publisher of the Common Constitutional blog, he also is a contributing writer for Political Outcast, Godfather Politics, Minute Men News (Liberty Alliance) and Free Republic